In July 2015, we helped Sprite open a pop-up venue in lower Manhattan called The Sprite Corner. Ostensibly a Sprite-themed bodega, The Sprite Corner featured all the authentic trappings of a typical New York City corner convenience store but actually harbored an exclusive secret event space.

On entering, guests were greeted by a plethora of products, from breakfast cereal to candy bars. But almost all the products were created especially for The Sprite Corner. I oversaw the design of half of the 50-odd products and their packaging, including Frosted Fleeks, Oh Snap! potato chips, and Trill Mix. For many of the products, I designed names, illustrations, and logos for every box, bag, label and wrapper.

Once past the bodega entryway, guests found themselves in a hidden event space, complete with a performance stage and bleacher-style seating.

I designed a large neon wall installation for the space, incorporating drawings by the other designers as well as my own, and providing several options for the client's consideration.

The final produced design measured over 8 feet across and was almost bright enough to light up the entire space on its own.

NFL Large Format

For the last few years, I've worked with Imagination's New York office on promoting the National Football League's annual International Series. Every season, three NFL games are played in London's Wembley Stadium, the second largest arena in Europe, and Imagination creates and produces every piece of visual communication for the venue.

In 2015, almost 50 different players from six NFL teams were featured in digital billboards, column wraps, wall graphics and stadium banners. As the photo-retoucher on the project, I had the task of ensuring every single player image not only looked gritty and compelling, but was consistent with NFL guidelines. This shot of the New York Jets' Darrelle Revis, for example, required a color change to the uniform, in addition to a half-dozen other corrections. Every player image had to be color-corrected so that the uniform colors matched their PANTONE equivalents.

Here's one example of the many ways the image was used at the famed London arena.

I worked on the project in 2014 as well, retouching over 60 player images.

Londoners loved getting up-close with the wall banners, which underscored how important it was to get every detail right during the retouching phase.

A small selection of the dozens of player images that were retouched in 2015.

Look here — this required some real vision on the part of the creators, and the result was a sight to behold, and unforgettable to anyone who eyed it. Read on…

Squarespace wanted to show the world how easy it is to create a Squarespace web site. Weirdly enough, it's actually pretty easy — I built this site on Squarespace myself. But since not everyone knows that, the team at W+K NY connected Squarespace with actor and recording artist Jeff Bridges. Together, we created a Super Bowl campaign to promote Jeff's album Sleeping Tapes, filled with spoken-word recordings designed to be literally sleep-inducing.

On Jeff's Squarespace site, users could stream the album or buy a physical copy. A very limited number of signed box sets were made available via auction as well, raising thousands of dollars for No Kid Hungry, Jeff's charity of choice.

I worked primarily on the packaging of the album, which was available in three different editions: a gold-foil gatefold edition with gold vinyl, a regular edition on black vinyl, and a cassette tape edition (for those people who still listen to their Walkman in bed, obviously). Notably, the eyes on the cover of the gold edition "went to sleep" when the slipcover was pulled out of the jacket, and the liner notes printed on the record label were designed to hypnotize the listener with their rotating spiral layout.

For Gap's 2014 Holiday ad campaign, I put stripes on Gap's iconic and rarely-futzed-with logo. Amazingly, the client approved it, probably because it took their signature striped sweaters as inspiration. I then developed three variations: one for men, one for women, and a generic brand version that could be used for either.

Together with designer James Hughes, I also developed a style guide for the campaign, including usage guidelines for the stripy brand mark.

The logo was used in all channels of the campaign, including print ads, OOH, and online.

The stripy logo also appeared on endcards for all four 30-second spots, directed by Sofia Coppola.

Portraits

I made these old-timey portraits — for the re-launch of Southern Comfort's website — entirely in Photoshop, using a technique very similar to The Wall Street Journal's hedcut drawing process. So they're just like the ones you'd see in The Wall Street Journal. Except, you know, crappier.

W+K Logo

Agency Wieden+Kennedy NYYear 2013Role Design

When the New York office of Wieden+Kennedy was remodeled, there were numerous blank white walls. So, in contrast to what originally felt like a cold and clinical office space, I designed this spidery, handwritten wordmark for the reception wall in the lobby.

Walk In Stupid

Agency Wieden+Kennedy NYYear 2013Role Design

This was designed to be a rubber welcome mat for the W+K office in New York, believe it or not ("Walk in stupid every day" is one of W+K's famous mantras). Unfortunately, we found out later that no one makes custom one-off rubber mats. How stupid.

Working closely with the art directors, I designed ESPN's NASCAR Sprint Cup campaign print ads over three seasons. Every week for 17 straight weeks at the climax of the season, our team designed a new ad that directly addressed the previous race, including photography from the event. This afforded us less than 24 hours to source the right set of image options, write multiple lines of copy for the client's consideration, and put them all together in time for the production process (retouching, proofreading, mechanical-building) to run its course. And we'd do the whole thing all over again the following week.

The weekly ads ran in newspapers across the country, but we'd also place monthly magazine ads (like the ones above). Because of the rapid turnaround times, it helped that I was both the designer and the production artist on the project. This allowed me to address production considerations in the design stage, in order to steer clear of any potential problems that might cause delivery delays. On certain weeks, when our retouchers were slammed on other work, I was able to draw on my own experience and perform retouching duties myself.

For 2011, we gave the campaign a gritty, desaturated look, and used a single primary typeface, Ziggurat, by Hoefler & Co.

We updated the look and feel of the campaign in 2012 using variations of House Industries' United typeface, as well as Hoefler & Co's Acropolis.

I also wrote and designed style guides and asset guides for the entire print campaign.

The Workshop

This is a drawing I made for the glass wall of a room called the Workshop, in the New York offices of Wieden+Kennedy. The Workshop is a workspace for the studio's use, where designers and artists can build anything from hand-bound hardcover books to sculptural busts made from Oreo cookie filling (true story). This drawing represents the energy and eccentricity of the studio.

The Workshop word mark evolved out of a doodle I made two years earlier — that of a diamond-shaped mark intended as a brand symbol for the studio. I began to explore more some non-traditional typography, which forced the letters to break out of the confines of the diamond. After several iterations, I arrived at something I was somewhat happy with (bottom-right) and it was time to bust out the Wacom tablet and draw the thing in Illustrator.

This is the initial drawing in Illustrator. It breaks a lot of rules of typography, but I was more interested in creating something energetic and irreverent. Still, there were lots of proverbial rough edges to smooth out.

This is the finished word mark. It loosely retains the diamond shape from my original sketch, but isn't constrained by it, and I rounded the corners to give it a worn, well-used feel.

In the drawing, the word mark interacts with the cast of characters, even though it's designed to be a two-dimensional graphic. This probably belies the influence comic books and movie posters have had on my illustration work.

Finally, the fun part — I used five Krink K-42 white paint markers to re-draw the entire drawing on the glass wall of the Workshop (in-progress pic on the left, completed drawing on the right).

Target Spring Shops

For this series of print ads promoting Target's Spring Shops in 2012, I worked closely with the art directors to create photo comps of each ad, performed some retouching, then built mechanicals for production.

WorkAC Poster

Agency Wieden+Kennedy NYYear 2011Role Design, Construction

This is a poster I designed to publicize a presentation by architecture firm WorkAC, who re-designed the New York offices of W+K. In keeping with the firm's area of expertise, I brought in elements of construction by building a three dimensional surface punctuated by rows of windows.

Each poster was handmade, with every window being cut and pushed in by hand.

Absolut

As part of a brand refocusing effort in 2011, Stag & Hare created the definitive image library and visual standards for the world's most recognizable vodka, Absolut. I was brought in for retouching duties.

To ensure color consistency across the entire photo library, I created standardized assets like backgrounds and bottles in Photoshop.

Of course, everything began with Martin Wonnacott's stellar photography. I then created blank background files based on photos, then comped the real bottle in. The bottles were then "scrubbed" in Photoshop so that color-accurate graphics and type could be applied onto the blanks. Finally, shadows and reflections were added.

Part of the effort included these awesome drink and garnish arrangements that represented each of the four seasons. This one, above, evokes summer.

Each of these arrangements was based on actual photography, and then re-comped and re-assembled in Photoshop. I started with the un-retouched background, then created a clean environment onto which a bottle could be placed. Drinks and garnishes from a different shot were comped in, together with reflections. The orange drink at the front had to be replaced with a red one.

Every element was worked on separately. Among other things, the orange slice in the drink needed color correction to ensure it looked like a real, juicy piece of fruit.

Here's the final retouched image, designed to evoke autumn. The ones below represent holiday and spring, respectively.

This is my favorite project I've ever worked on. Even though designing it only took a weekend, and building the mechanical took five minutes, this billboard has arguably had a bigger impact than all of my other work combined, because it ignited a conversation both at the national level in the birthplace of soccer, and around the world. This is the true story of the Welcome to Manchester billboard.

The chap in the billboard is Carlos Tevez. Before the start of the 2009 English Premier League season — before this billboard was even a twinkle in a creative director's eye — Tevez was one of the most prominent players in the English city of Manchester. Except he didn't play for Manchester City FC — he played for the global behemoth of a soccer club, Manchester United, which at the time was the far more successful of the two clubs, even if its grounds aren't even technically located in the city of Manchester. In the summer of 2009, United was under considerable pressure to sign Tevez to a long-term contract since he'd been on loan to United up until then. But they didn't. Their crosstown rivals MCFC did instead.

To celebrate, we created this billboard over the weekend and immediately put it up at the top of Deansgate, a busy shopping area in the Manchester city center. "Welcome to Manchester," it read. What did that mean, exactly? Was it welcoming Tevez to the "real" Manchester? Was it supposed to be Tevez himself welcoming visitors to Manchester? Was it advertising the club or the city? Was it meant to taunt United fans, perhaps even the top brass at United who failed to sign Tevez? All of the above? We hoped everyone else would be asking the same questions.

Happily, and perhaps predictably, City fans loved the billboard, and began converging on the spot to have their photos taken with it.

Manchester United fans, on the other hand, were so riled up that they attempted to deface the billboard by hurling rolled up socks soaked in red paint at it (red being United's color). The effort was more detrimental to the sidewalk beneath than the billboard itself. And of course, the very act of defacing the billboard generated even more conversation.

News first spread nationally across the UK, then internationally as sports news pages as far away as Singapore and Brazil began covering the reactions to the billboard. It certainly helped that the manager of United himself, Sir Alex Ferguson, responded directly to the billboard during a press conference, calling it "stupid and arrogant".

Parodies were created first by fans, and then by legitimate entities like heavyweight boxer David Haye (top-left) who publicized his upcoming bout in Manchester with what was virtually a carbon copy of our billboard. And as recently as 2014, online betting firm Betfair ripped off our ad to welcome incoming United manager Louis Van Gaal (bottom-right), of all people.

It's impossible to quantify the media value generated by this single billboard. But a very conservative estimate puts it at £5million, over 100 times the production cost of the ad. That's a return on investment that anyone would welcome with open arms.

Converse Mutants

In collaboration with the Converse creative team at Anomaly, I did the photo compositing, retouching and production design for this outdoor campaign, called Converse One "Mutants".

Obviously, the idea was that these outlandish beasties mirrored the infinitely customizable Converse One sneaker. But the campaign was also a great excuse to put up some wacky posters on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Tailored by England

For the 2009 launch of England's national team soccer kit, we at Anomaly partnered with Umbro to create the Tailored by England campaign. One facet of the campaign highlighted the dizzying diversity of England's population. 198 people, each from a different country of origin but now a resident of England, were photographed wearing the new jersey by photographer Finlay Mackay. I built enough production files to fill London's Trafalgar Square with posters of each of the 198 representatives.

I also built and organized production files for London Underground station dominations, like this one.

And finally, I built 198 more files that were printed and installed on a wall at the National Geographic Society in conjunction with the launch of the kit.